MEET DORA N. WATKINS, PHD, MSW

I keep returning to and being troubled by the same deeply political and epistemological question: What do we mean when we call someone resilient?

I have never been satisfied by the ease of that word. Resilience can sound like praise and sometimes it is. But praise can conceal a demand. For example, a person survives something brutal and we call them strong or a community absorbs generations of structural abandonment and we admire its resilience. Likewise, Blackwomen endure what should never have been required of them, and their endurance becomes evidence of exceptional capacity. 

Eventually I began asking a different question: What if resilience tells us as much about the worlds people are being asked to survive as it tells us about the people surviving them?

And that question has followed me for years. It introduced me to Black feminist epistemology, the genealogy of resilience, Blackwomen's stories, healing justice, critical participatory inquiry, and  art. It's also taken me into the politics of measurement and questions about who gets to name human adaptation and decide what counts as doing well.

And eventually it took me somewhere stranger, toward the Human itself. I am increasingly interested in the assumptions hiding underneath the categories social science uses so easily (i.e., healthy, adaptive, functional, well-adjusted, resilient, recovered, and thriving). Each concept carries significant weight, alludes to a theory about people, and imagines what a life should look like.

I want to know who built those theories, whose lives they recognize, whose lives they misread, and what happens when people historically relegated to the margins of knowledge refuse merely to be interpreted and begin theorizing the categories themselves.

My dissertation, RARE Spaces for Strong Stories and Healing Justice: A Critical Genealogy of Resilience Among Blackwomen in a U.S. Context (2025), began with resilience and six differently situated Blackwomen. But the study became messy, quickly, and kept exceeding its original questions. Story became much more than data, the spaces we occupied became more than a research setting, relationships became more than simply building rapport, and art became more than technique.

My co-researchers were not simply describing resilience, but they were theorizing it. And the conditions under which we were thinking together were shaping what could become known. That realization became deeply intimate and intentional; RARE Spaces. It also became a larger intellectual problem I have not stopped following:  What conditions make different forms of knowing possible?

I think from Black feminist epistemology and I study with scholars who make disciplinary boundaries difficult to maintain: Sylvia Wynter on the unfinished question of the Human; Katherine McKittrick on Black life, geography, story, method, and wonder; Christina Sharpe on the forms required to attend to Black life; Beronda L. Montgomery on organisms, environments, responsiveness, and thriving; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Black feminist thought, science, matter, and the cosmos.

I do not gather these thinkers to create a neat theoretical family or intellectual genealogy. For me, they trouble different parts of the same intellectual landscape and they help me think about people and environments, narration and world-making, science and story, adaptation and power, and life and the conditions under which particular forms of life become possible.

I  am especially interested in otherwise ways of knowing that have been disciplined to the edges of scholarship and knowledge-making and pushes the parameters of how we can come to know. Story, embodied knowledge, intimate wisdom, creative practice, memory, relationship, affect, and wonder/wander. I am interested in the knowledge made between people rather than possessed by one person and the things we know before we have learned how to make them legible.

I am not interested in romanticizing these forms. Instead, I am interested in taking them seriously enough to ask what they know, and increasingly, I am interested in what lies beyond critique. Black life cannot only be intellectually valuable because it teaches us about oppression and Blackwomen/Black womanhood cannot only enter theory through injury. Likewise, healing cannot simply mean becoming functional again, thriving cannot mean performing wellness successfully, and liberation cannot be reduced to surviving more comfortably.

I want to know what becomes possible when survival stops organizing and dominating the imagination, and what ways of being become available then? What forms of relation? What pleasures? What worlds? What kinds of human beings might we become if adaptation were not our highest aspiration? 

I do not yet have language for all of it and that is part of the work. 

The Healing Project is where I stay with the questions long enough for them to change me.